When I was a toddler, my parents built our timberframe home. This book wasn't published until after the house was built (1995), but seems to have been in line with their aesthetic sensibilities. I found it at their place over the holidays, and decided to read it, as I have been thinking about a place of my own.

In recent winters I've read other books about architecture—Michael Pollan's "A Place of My Own;" Tedd Benson's "Timberframe;" Catherine Slessor's "See-Through Houses;" Gestalt's "Stay Wild." Like this book, most of these others aren't recently-published (with the exception of "Stay Wild"), and have more to do with the aesthetic of my upbringing than the current moment.

I recently asked three architect friends for book recommendations related to residential Living Buildings. Nothing they recommended seemed worth following up on, so I ended up reading this instead.

The book has me thinking about what Andreas Weber says regarding gesture. Gesture, or gestalt, communicates the essence of something. When you are present and observing, it isn't hard to tap into. Our own bodies can metabolize the gestures that surround us. Living in the times we do, one of the primary gestures we encounter are of the "built environment" surrounding us. Residential homes—the places we spend most of our time (especially in this post-office era)—have an outsized impact on our daily experience.

The inquiry of this book is timeless. It includes a survey of traditional natural ways of building from across the world. It also looks at what were, in the early 1990s, a resurgence and reinvention of traditional natural building.

It seems this book, and its author, have been lost to the sands of time. Given the bent natural building in recent decades, I'm surprised that, in doing a web search, almost nothing shows up about David Pearson. Many of the projects he highlights at the end of the book have also since disappeared (although some have continued to persist and evolve).

The book is a quick and easy read—more than half of the page count are photos with detailed captions. This book certainly isn't the exhaustive magnum opus that Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language," has become; maybe this is one of the reasons it hasn't endured. That said, it is still a beautiful, genuine, and inspiring work. I wish there were more books being written today in this style! ( )

Some pretty pictures, but not much in the way of practical ideas. Does have an historical survey of world vernacular architectures. ( )